Algorithmic Collusion Without Threats

 Quanta magazine reports on a recent paper on algorithmic collusion (in which a big class of "dumb" strategies can settle on high prices):

The Game Theory of How Algorithms Can Drive Up Prices
Recent findings reveal that even simple pricing algorithms can make things more expensive  by Ben Brubaker 

" how can regulators ensure that algorithms set fair prices? Their traditional approach won’t work, as it relies on finding explicit collusion. “The algorithms definitely are not having drinks with each other,” said Aaron Roth(opens a new tab), a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

...

" if you want to guarantee fair prices, why not just require sellers to use algorithms that are inherently incapable of expressing threats?

"In a recent paper(opens a new tab), Roth and four other computer scientists showed why this may not be enough. They proved that even seemingly benign algorithms that optimize for their own profit can sometimes yield bad outcomes for buyers. “You can still get high prices in ways that kind of look reasonable from the outside,” said Natalie Collina(opens a new tab), a graduate student working with Roth who co-authored the new study.

...

"“Without some notion of a threat or an agreement, it’s very hard for a regulator to come in and say, ‘These prices feel wrong,’” said Mallesh Pai(opens a new tab), an economist at Rice University. “That’s one reason why I think this paper is important.”

...

"So, what can regulators do? Roth admits he doesn’t have an answer. It wouldn’t make sense to ban no-swap-regret algorithms: If everyone uses one, prices will fall. But a simple nonresponsive strategy might be a natural choice for a seller on an online marketplace like Amazon, even if it carries the risk of regret.

“One way to have regret is just to be kind of dumb,” Roth said. “Historically, that hasn’t been illegal.”

#######

And here's the paper:

Algorithmic Collusion Without Threats 

Eshwar Ram Arunachaleswaran, Natalie Collina, Sampath Kannan, Aaron Roth, Juba Ziani

There has been substantial recent concern that pricing algorithms might learn to ``collude.'' Supra-competitive prices can emerge as a Nash equilibrium of repeated pricing games, in which sellers play strategies which threaten to punish their competitors who refuse to support high prices, and these strategies can be automatically learned. In fact, a standard economic intuition is that supra-competitive prices emerge from either the use of threats, or a failure of one party to optimize their payoff. Is this intuition correct? Would preventing threats in algorithmic decision-making prevent supra-competitive prices when sellers are optimizing for their own revenue? No. We show that supra-competitive prices can emerge even when both players are using algorithms which do not encode threats, and which optimize for their own revenue. We study sequential pricing games in which a first mover deploys an algorithm and then a second mover optimizes within the resulting environment. We show that if the first mover deploys any algorithm with a no-regret guarantee, and then the second mover even approximately optimizes within this now static environment, monopoly-like prices arise. The result holds for any no-regret learning algorithm deployed by the first mover and for any pricing policy of the second mover that obtains them profit at least as high as a random pricing would -- and hence the result applies even when the second mover is optimizing only within a space of non-responsive pricing distributions which are incapable of encoding threats. In fact, there exists a set of strategies, neither of which explicitly encode threats that form a Nash equilibrium of the simultaneous pricing game in algorithm space, and lead to near monopoly prices. This suggests that the definition of ``algorithmic collusion'' may need to be expanded, to include strategies without explicitly encoded threats.

 

 

 

  

Divergent views on behavioral economics: books by Loewenstein and Chater, and Thaler and Imas

 You could hardly have two more different books on behavioral economics, both by important contributors to the field. Chater and Loewenstein regret their part in what they feel has turned into a scam, while Thaler and Imas celebrate how it has gone from victory to victory.

It's On You.  How they rig the rules and we get the blame for society's problems 
by
Nick Chater and George Loewenstein
 

"Two decades ago, behavioral economics burst from academia to the halls of power, on both sides of the Atlantic, with the promise that correcting individual biases could help transform society. The hope was that governments could deploy a new approach to addressing society’s deepest challenges, from inadequate retirement planning to climate change—gently, but cleverly, nudging people to make choices for their own good and the good of the planet.

"It was all very convenient, and false. As behavioral scientists Nick Chater and George Loewenstein show in It’s On You, nudges rarely work, and divert us from policies that do. For example, being nudged to switch to green energy doesn’t cut carbon, and it distracts from the real challenge of building a low-carbon economy.

"It’s on You shows how the rich and powerful have repeatedly used a clever sleight of hand: blaming individuals for social problems, with behavioral economics an unwitting accomplice, while lobbying against the systemic changes that could actually help. As two original proponents of the nudge principle, Nick and George now argue that rather than trying to “fix” the victims of bad policies, real progress requires rewriting the social and economic rulebook for the common good."

 

###### 

 

The Winner's Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now
by Richard H. Thaler  and Alex Imas  

"Nobel Prize winner Richard H. Thaler and rising star economist Alex O. Imas explore the past, present, and cutting-edge future in behavioral economics in The Winner’s Curse.

"Why do people cooperate with one another when they have no obvious motivation to do so? Why do we hold on to possessions of little value? And why is the winner of an auction so often disappointed?

"Over thirty years ago, Richard H. Thaler introduced readers to behavioral economics in his seminal Anomalies column, written with collaborators including Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. These provocative articles challenged the fundamental idea at the heart of economics that people are selfish, rational optimizers, and provided the foundation for what became behavioral economics. That was then.

"Now, three decades later, Thaler has teamed up with economist Alex O. Imas to write a new book with an original and creative format. Each chapter starts with an original Anomaly, retaining the spirit of its time stamp. Then, shifting to the present, the authors provide updates to each, asking how the original findings have held up and how the field has evolved since then.

"It turns out that the original findings not only hold up well, but they show up almost everywhere. Anomalies pop up in people’s decisions to save for retirement and how they carry outstanding credit card debt. Even experts fail to optimize. The key concept of loss aversion explains missed putts by PGA pros and the selection of which stocks to sell by portfolio managers. In this era of meme stocks and Dogecoin, it is hard to defend the view that financial markets are highly efficient. The good news, however, is that the anomalies have gotten funnier." 

 

Do we need to worry that surrogacy will be banned in the US? (by the UN??)

  Stat News has a call to prevent surrogacy from being banned, following a recent UN resolution to do just that.

How to keep commercial surrogacy from getting banned
An unlikely alliance working to end surrogacy is gaining power    By Arthur L. Caplan  Oct. 20, 2025
Caplan is head of the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. 

 

Caplan calls for more regulation, which might be a fine idea.  But I don't share his concern that the UN call to ban surrogacy will lead to it being banned in the US. Surrogacy in one form or another has been legalized in every US state (or maybe all but one.)   This is one of those times where it's good that the UN is toothless. 

 

HT: Martha Gershun 

Harvard University's Financial Report for 2025

 Here is Harvard's Financial Report FISCAL YEAR 2025 

Here's the first paragraph of the Message from the President; 

"Message from the President
I am pleased to submit Harvard University’s financial results. Even by the standards of our centuries-long history, fiscal year 2025 was extraordinarily challenging, with political and economic disruption affecting many sectors, including higher education. Following the termination of federal research funding awarded to Harvard, an act the US District Court has since found to be unlawful, the University committed $250 million in contingency funding, which the Schools supplemented with additional funding. To focus our resources on the University’s core mission of teaching, learning, and research, we made difficult but necessary choices. We announced a hiring freeze and painful layoffs, kept salary increases flat for exempt employees, and scaled back projects and expenditures ."

 

Here are the first paragraphs of the Financial Overview:

"Fiscal year 2025 tested Harvard in ways few could have anticipated.
 

"We began the year with challenges already in view: expenses rising faster than revenues, inflationary pressures amid broader economic uncertainty, and the ongoing work of renewing and rebuilding our
community. We closed it confronting the abrupt termination of nearly all of Harvard’s federal research grants, facing potential constraints on the exchange of international scholars, and considering how we will absorb the enactment of a substantial increase to the federal tax on endowment income, scheduled to take effect in fiscal 2027.
 

"All of these developments have raised new questions about the financial foundations of higher education and underscore a shifting federal policy environment that will shape the future. 

"The consequences of these shifts are only beginning to be felt. Harvard ended the year with a $113 million deficit, a -1.7% margin on a $6.7 billion operating revenue base." 

The international black market in stolen smartphones

Modern "pick pockets" are now  mounted on ebikes and swiping smartphones...

 The NYT has the story:

London Became a Global Hub for Phone Theft. Now We Know Why.
About 80,000 phones were stolen in the British capital last year. The police are finally discovering where many of them went.  By Lizzie Dearden and Amelia Nierenberg

" Increasingly brazen thieves, often masked and on e-bikes, have become adept at snatching phones from residents and tourists. A record 80,000 phones were stolen in the city last year, according to the police, giving London an undesirable reputation as a European capital for the crime.

...

"But last December, they got an intriguing lead from a woman who had used “Find My iPhone” to track her device to a warehouse near Heathrow Airport. Arriving there on Christmas Eve, officers found boxes bound for Hong Kong. They were labeled as batteries but contained almost 1,000 stolen iPhones.

...

"Some phones are reset and sold to new users in Britain. But many are shipped to China and Algeria as part of a “local-to-global criminal business model,” the police said, adding that in China, the newest phones could be sold for up to $5,000, generating huge profits for the criminals involved.
"
Joss Wright, an associate professor at the University of Oxford who specializes in cybersecurity, said that it is easier to use stolen British phones in China than elsewhere because many of the country’s network providers do not subscribe to an international blacklist that bars devices that have been reported stolen. 

...

"Sgt. Matt Chantry, one of the leaders of the raid last month, said in an interview that thieves on e-bikes were “a real problem.” They mount sidewalks and swipe phones from people’s hands at high speed, he said, while making themselves “unidentifiable” by wearing balaclavas and hoods. “How do you police that?” he asked.

"Attempting to chase them on London’s sometimes gridlocked streets is “high-risk,” he said, endangering pedestrians, other drivers and the offender. Ultimately, he said, the police had to ask, is the risk of a fatality worth it for a cellphone? 

...

"But the police are also hoping users will become more savvy about their personal security. Even as smartphones have become more advanced and valuable, many people’s handling of them has become less protective. For the modern phone thief, a classic mark is a pedestrian walking close to the curb, deeply absorbed by the content on a cell screen — a map, a text, a video.

“You wouldn’t count your money on the street,” said Lawrence Sherman, an emeritus criminology professor at the University of Cambridge. “But when the phone is worth £1,000, it’s like pulling £1,000 out of your wallet and looking at it as you walk.” 

Experiments and behavioral market design at Pitt (tomorrow)

 I'm flying  back to my old haunts in Pittsburgh today, for (among other things) two events at the University of Pittsburgh tomorrow:

 October 17, 2025 PEEL Reopening Ceremony with Professor Vesterlund & Professor Roth

"The History of PEEL: The Pittsburgh Experimental Economics Laboratory (PEEL) was founded by John Kagel and Alvin Roth, a Nobel Laureate in Economics. Since its inception, PEEL has served as a hub for pioneering research in experimental economics. Notably, the lab contributed to foundational work on market design, which played a significant role in Roth’s Nobel Prize-winning contributions. Over the decades, PEEL has maintained its reputation as a center of excellence, attracting top scholars and fostering innovation in economic research. +

 

October 17, 2025 BEDI Workshop (Behavioral Economics and Design Initiative)

BEDI Workshop - Friday, October 17th, 2025

Breakfast | 8:15 am – 8:45 am
Wesley W. Posvar Hall, 4130, 230 S Bouquet St, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 

Conference Welcome | 8:45 am – 9:00 am
Lise Vesterlund, BEDI Director, Andrew W. Mellon Professor, University of Pittsburgh

Session 1 | 9:00 am – 10:40 am
Erina Ytsma– Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, “Gender Differences in the
Response to Incentives: Evidence from Academia”
Stephanie Wang – Professor, University of Pittsburgh
Claire Duquennois – Assistant Professor, University of Pittsburgh, “Minority athletic performance,
racial attitudes, and racial hate”
Jonathan Woon – Professor & Associate Dean, University of Pittsburgh, “The Epistemology of
Justice: Awareness and Institutional Choice”

Refreshment Break | 10:40 am – 11:10 am

Session 2 | 11:10 am – 12:00 pm
Jenny Chang – Graduate Student, Carnegie Mellon University, “When Women Self-Promote:
Evidence on Beliefs and Downstream Consequences”
Aden Halpern – Graduate Student, University of Pittsburgh 

Brandon Williams – Graduate Student, University of Pittsburgh
Dhwani Yagnaraman – Graduate Student, Carnegie Mellon University, “Crowd-in and crowd-out of
climate policies”
Aaron Balleisen– Graduate Student, Carnegie Mellon University, “Cheap Talk and Pluralistic
Ignorance”

Lunch | 12:00 am – 1:15 pm

Session 3 | 1:15 pm – 2:30 pm
Osea Giuntella – Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh, “Beliefs, Resilience, and Leadership: Evaluating Trauma-Informed Training”
John Conlon – Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, “Memory Rehearsal and Belief Biases”
Alex Chan – Professor, Harvard University, “Preference for Explainable AI”

PEEL Re-Opening + Refreshment Break | 2:30 pm to 3:30 pm

Session 4 | 3:30 pm – 4:45 pm
Alistair Wilson – Professor, University of Pittsburgh, “Veto Delegation: A Mechanism that works! (Kinda)”
Yucheng Liang – Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, “Asking the Right Questions: Information Acquisition for Choices under Risk”
Muriel Niederle - Professor, Stanford University

 

U.Penn celebrates Judd Kessler's new book with a short excerpt

 You can read an excerpt from the introduction to Judd Kessler's new book Lucky by Design (which came out yesterday) here: 

The Hidden Markets All Around Us
October 14, 2025 • 6 min read
In an excerpt from his new book, 'Lucky by Design,' Wharton’s Judd Kessler looks at the hidden markets that determine who gets what in everyday life, and the rules that underpin them. 

Investigating human and LLM psychology by prompting LLMs to play experimental economics games: Xie, Mei, Yuan, and Jackson in PNAS

 The great science fiction writer of my youth was Isaac Asimov, who not only wrote space opera (The Foundation Trilogy), but also wrote about intelligent robots, i.e. about robots with artificial general intelligence.  So, like you and me, they had complicated psychological lives, and one of the main characters in these stories was the robopsychologist  Dr. Susan Calvin (see e.g. the short story collection I, Robot, and also several of the robot novels).

I'm reminded of this by the several papers now reporting how large language models respond when asked to play games that have been used to study human behavior.  Those papers are framed as using LLMs to learn about the human behavior on which they were trained. But they can also be read as telling us about the 'psychology' of LLMs. Here's a good one from the PNAS. 

Xie, Yutong, Qiaozhu Mei, Walter Yuan, and Matthew O. Jackson. "Using large language models to categorize strategic situations and decipher motivations behind human behaviors." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 35 (2025): e2512075122. 

Abstract: By varying prompts to a large language model, we can elicit the full range of human behaviors in a variety of different scenarios in classic economic games. By analyzing which prompts elicit which behaviors, we can categorize and compare different strategic situations, which can also help provide insight into what different economic scenarios might induce people to think about. We discuss how this provides a step toward a nonstandard method of inferring (deciphering) the motivations behind the human behaviors. We also show how this deciphering process can be used to categorize differences in the behavioral tendencies of different populations. 

 

Peace is a process (and so is disarmament)

 Peace is a process, not always a quick one.

This, from the NYT:

A Crackdown on a Deadly Wedding Custom
Marriages and other glad occasions in Syria are often celebrated by firing shots in the air. But after nearly 14 years of war, people want the guns to go silent.   By Raja Abdulrahim 

"For as long as people can remember, the crack of celebratory gunfire has filled the sky above the [wedding] festivities — even though falling bullets would occasionally wound or even kill people. 

"Shooting in the air was also an expression of joy at the birth of a child, a graduation, the homecoming of exiles. It commemorated sad occasions, too, such as funerals.

"The new government, formed by the rebels who ousted the Assad dictatorship in December, is trying to change the practice as part of efforts to bolster security and reduce the spread of weapons.

"The tradition, which may have its roots in how military victories were celebrated, is not unique to Syria. 

...

"Now, if a weapon is fired at a wedding, the authorities can seize it and levy a $100 fine. If the gun is not handed over, a relative of the groom — his father or an uncle, perhaps — can be detained until the firearm is turned in.

“We don’t take the groom,” Mr. Dandar said, offering up a concession. 

 

John Gurdon (1933-2025)

One hope for a future free of the need for human organ transplants is that it might become possible to re-initiate the process by which embryos originally grow their own kidneys from stem cells, i.e. from cells that are "pluripotent,"  in that they retain the possibility  of growing into any of the organs with which we humans come originally equipped.

Great progress is being made in that direction, although  obviating the need for transplants is still only a distant hope.   I had the good fortune to meet two of the pioneers of those efforts, in Stockholm in 2012, when that year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Sir John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka "for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent"  

John has now died, at the age of 92.  I hope he  derived great satisfaction from the fact that his pioneering work is continuing to lead to steady progress.

 Here's his obituary from the Guardian, which contains an anecdote that I recall he shared in Stockholm. His story should give comfort to students unappreciated by teachers who don't realize that students retain a good deal of pluripotency regarding what kind of adults and scholars they will become.

 Sir John Gurdon obituary. Biologist who won the Nobel prize for discovering that adult cells can be reprogrammed.  byGeorgina Ferry

 " His career narrowly missed being driven off course by a report from his biology teacher, placing him last in his year and dismissing his idea of becoming a scientist as a “sheer waste of time, both on his part, and of those who have to teach him.”

“I will not be bookended by two fascist regimes.” writes Joachim Frank of Columbia University

  Joachim Frank, who shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, powerfully condemns the attacks on universities, and what he sees as the failure of his own university, Columbia, to mount  a principled defense.

“I will not be bookended by two fascist regimes.” he begins, recounting his birth in Germany, and his immigration to the U.S. as a young scientist. 

 But current events move him to write

"But in 2025, things are starting to feel all too reminiscent of the world I left behind in the Germany of my childhood." 

Nobel Winner: Colleges Teach Critical Thinkers. That’s Why We’re Being Targeted., US News & World Reports, Oct. 7

 "Autocrats try to control universities because we nurture independent thought. It’s time to defend our freedoms."

...

 "Columbia University, where I work as a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics, was put in a difficult historical position by being one of the first universities in the Trump administration’s line of fire earlier this year. In July, the university was pressured to pay the
government $200 million and accept numerous outrageous demands – including limiting international student admissions and allowing outside oversight of certain academic disciplines –in order to unfreeze $1.3 billion in federal funding the Trump administration had withheld to bully Columbia into compliance.

"I had hoped the leadership of my esteemed university would resist the administration’s unreasonable demands, rather than negotiating away its autonomy. But instead of suing the government for illegally freezing grants – as Harvard did – Columbia caved in, setting a
dangerous precedent that encouraged those in power to escalate pressure on other institutions. Trump is now demanding that Harvard pay $500 million and UCLA cough up $1 billion – and accept other conditions to end persecution by the government."

 

 HT: Richard Roberts

 

 

Job market advice for new Ph.D. economists, from John Cawley

 From applying for jobs, to signaling for interviews,  through interviews, flyouts, offers and the scramble, John Cawley, the chair of the American Economic Association's Committee on the Job Market has measured advice in this video.  If you're on the market this year, do yourself a favor (pour a stiff drink) and listen, not just to the beginning discussion of disruptions in demand thisyear, but to the whole thing.

    
2025 Webinar on the Economics PhD Job Market 

Pig liver to human transplant: in China: a short story that may get longer...

 Here's a forthcoming article in the Journal of Hepatology.

Pioneering transplantation often provides tragic short stories of first attempts, that over time become longer, much more hopeful stories. 

Genetically engineered pig-to-human liver xenotransplantation

Zhang, Wenjie et al., Journal of Hepatology,

"In China alone, hundreds of thousands of individuals experience liver failure every year, but only approximately 6000 received a liver transplant in 2022[6]. Compared to the heart and kidney, the human liver exhibits more complex functions, including metabolism, detoxification, and immune regulation, which present unique challenges in xenotransplantation and might limit the success of cross-species transplantation[7, 8]. Encouragingly, xenotransplantation of pig livers has experienced a surge in 2024. In January, a United States based team connected a genetically modified pig liver outside the body of a brain-dead person, and the liver circulated the patient’s blood for three days[9]. In March, a Chinese team transplanted a 6-gene edited pig liver into a brain-dead individual and lasted for 10 days[10]. The pig liver exhibited signs of functionality, including the daily secretion of more than 30 milliliters of bile, which aids in digestion and is indicative of its metabolic activity[11]. These studies provide evidence of the feasibility and functionality of genetically modified porcine-to-human liver xenotransplantation. ... Unlike full xenotransplantation, which requires complete removal of the native liver, auxiliary xenotransplantation preserves a portion of the recipient’s liver while providing additional hepatic support. This less invasive strategy offers potential as a bridging therapy for patients awaiting recovery or subsequent human liver transplantation. In this groundbreaking study, a 71-year-old patient was the first living individual to receive a liver transplant from a genetically modified pig. During the initial 31 postoperative days, the patient showed no signs of infection or rejection, with gradual improvements in liver function and coagulation parameters. 

"However, on day 31, symptoms of xenotransplantation-associated thrombotic microangiopathy (xTMA) emerged, and antibody therapy was ineffective. As a result, the porcine liver was removed, relying on regeneration of the patient's left hepatic lobe. Following a course of antibody treatment, the xTMA symptoms resolved. Unfortunately, on postoperative day 135, the patient experienced sudden upper gastrointestinal hemorrhage. Despite repeated medical interventions, the bleeding episodes persisted. ultimately leading to the patient’s death on postoperative day 171."

 

New Fellows of the Econometric Society

 The Econometric Society has announced the results of the 2025 election of new Fellows.

Congratulations to all of them. It's a great list, that includes important market designers and  experimental/behavioral economists.

"The Society is pleased to announce the election of 25 new Fellows of the Econometric Society. The 2025 Fellows of the Econometric Society follow. Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Duke University S. Nageeb Ali, Pennsylvania State University Heather Anderson, Monash University Debopam Bhattacharya, University of Cambridge Francis Bloch, Universite Paris 1 and Paris School of Economics Eric Budish, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Yi-Chun Chen, National University of Singapore Xavier D’Haultfoeuille, CREST-ENSAE Cecile Gaubert, University of California, Berkeley Bryan Graham, University of California, Berkeley Nathaniel Hendren, MIT Oscar Jorda, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco/University of California, Davis Anil K Kashyap, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Jinwoo Kim, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Frank Kleibergen, University of Amsterdam Ivana Komunjer, Georgetown University Leslie Marx, Duke University Edward Miguel, University of California, Berkeley Debasis Mishra, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi Tymofiy Mylovanov, Kyiv School of Economics and University of Pittsburgh Fabrizio Perri, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis David Romer, University of California, Berkeley Roland Strausz, Humboldt University of Berlin Francesco Trebbi, University of California, Berkeley Eyal Winter, Lancaster University and the Hebrew University" ########  In each of the years 2020-2024 the lists of new Fellows have been somewhat longer, and my sense is that we should keep trying to have longer lists, because we're  we're systematically missing many who would be jolly good Fellows.

Online dating in the US--is it past peak?

 Here's a 2022 survey I just came across from Pew Research. It caught my eye because it reports a much lower percentage of life partners arising from dating sites than were found in surveys by sociologists in 2009 and 2017.

From Looking for Love to Swiping the Field: Online Dating in the U.S.
Tinder is the most widely used dating platform in the U.S. About half of those who have used dating sites or apps have had positive experiences, and some have met their partners on one. But safety and harassment remain issues
By Colleen McClain and  Risa Gelles-Watnick 

 

 

 

"One-in-ten adults who are partnered – that is, they are married, living with a partner or in a committed romantic relationship – say they met this person on a dating site or app. The share rises to 20% of partnered adults under 30 who say online dating brought them together; about a quarter of LGB partnered adults say the same."

####### 

Those numbers of partnerships seem a lot lower than earlier numbers I recounted in this post:

Friday, August 9, 2019  Coupling up with the help of the internet

 

 

Guido Imbens reflects on "What’s it like to win a Nobel Prize?

 What’s it like to win a Nobel Prize? 

"Stanford physical chemist W.E. Moerner, who received the 2014 Nobel Prize in chemistry, and Stanford economist Guido W. Imbens, who received the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in economic sciences, reflect on what changed – and what didn’t – after receiving the award."

"Where were you when you learned you had won?

Imbens: I was at home and was woken up by a call from Sweden. It’s just this very strange sensation as they tell you, “Congratulations, we’ve voted to award you the prize and we’re going to have a press conference in half an hour.” So you have this half hour where there’s nothing happening, but there’s also a lot happening. It was this very delightful, exciting moment when the rest of the world didn’t know yet. Once it was announced, there were telephone calls and interviews the whole night and morning. Stanford sent over a team for video, photos, and to help with the press. Our kids made pancakes for the Stanford crew, who had the idea of having the three kids interview me, and the video is an absolute highlight from that morning.

 ...

How did winning the prize change your life?

Imbens: It does change the way people outside of academics treat you, and it opens up a lot of new opportunities. The Swedes are very keen on having people take on this role model part, and they took us to high schools there to talk to the students. That was a very nice and fun experience. The attention and invitations die down, but as far as I hear from other people, it doesn’t really go away. It’s a permanent change.

Within the academic world, it doesn’t change things all that much. I still write my papers, I submit my papers, I get them rejected. But it has broadened my research and changed a little bit of what I try to do. I spend more time trying to leverage what I do by working with students and other groups to do what I can to push the field forward.

...

The Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm exhibits artifacts from past laureates that offer a glimpse into their lives and work. What object did you donate?

Imbens: When I did the work with Josh Angrist for which I got the prize, we were living in Harvard faculty housing and we didn’t have laundry facilities there. On Saturday mornings we would go to the local laundromat and do our laundry. That’s where we worked on the paper for which we won the prize. So I donated a bottle of laundry detergent to the museum. Recently, the museum had an advertising campaign and they had posters with “the detergent that changed the world.”

###########

And here's an article in Nature about other science prizes, and how none of them have yet captured the world's attention the way the Nobels have:

These science prizes want to rival the Nobels: how do they compare?
By Chris Simms 

 

 

Grace Guan defends her dissertation at Stanford

 Grace Guan defended her Ph.D. dissertation this past Friday.

Welcome to the club, Grace. 

 

 

 Here's my earlier post about one of the papers she spoke about--for extra credit, see if you can identify four of her coauthors in the above post-defense photo:

Friday, May 23, 2025  Deceased organ allocation: deciding early when to move fast

 

Jane Goodall (1934-2025)

Iconoclastic scientists not only do novel science, but they do science in novel ways. Jane Goodall also communicated to a broad audience, and became an advocate as well as an observer.

 Nature publishes an appreciation of her life and work and its impact on science itself, and scientists.

Jane Goodall’s legacy: three ways she changed science.  The primatologist challenged what it meant to be a scientist. By Rachel Fieldhouse & Mohana Basu

"Goodall is best known for her work with chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. She was the first to discover that chimpanzees made and used tools1. She went on to become an advocate for conservation, human rights and animal welfare, including stopping the use of animals in medical research."

######### 

 Here's the NY Times obit: ( which mentions some of her recognitions, including an unusual one)

Jane Goodall, Who Chronicled the Social Lives of Chimps, Dies at 91. Her discoveries as a primatologist in the 1960s about how chimpanzees behave in the wild were hailed as “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.” By Keith Schneider 

"Her many awards include the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal, presented in 1995, and the Templeton Prize, given in 2021. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II named her a dame of the British Empire. In January, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

...

"In July 2022, Mattel released a Jane Goodall doll as part of its Barbie-branded Inspiring Women series." 

Race to the bottom: NLDAC and NY State both aim to be payers of last resort for reimbursing kidney donors

A tale of bureaucracy, in two acts 

1.  NLDAC, the federally funded National Living Donor Assistance Center, was for a long time the only organization that would reimburse  some expenses of living organ donors who qualified by not having high incomes, or any other sources for reimbursements.  That is NLDAC is a funder of last resort:

" Individuals considering becoming a living organ donor can apply for help with their travel expenses, lost wages, and dependent care expenses from NLDAC if they cannot be reimbursed for these costs by their recipient, a state program, or an insurance company.

2. In (very) late 2022,  New York State's Living Donor Support Act (LDSA, S. 1594) became law, and it is about to go into effect this year. The Act provides "state reimbursement to living organ donors, who are state residents, for medical and associated expenses incurred as a result of the organ donation, when the organ donation is made to another resident of the state" 

It further defines NY State as a payer of last resort:, and explicitly rules out payments to donors eligible for payment by NLDAC.

" THE  PROGRAM  SHALL  NOT  PAY  REIMBURSEMENT FOR EXPENSES PAID OR  REQUIRED TO BE PAID FOR BY ANY THIRD-PARTY  PAYER,  INCLUDING  WAGES  OR  OTHER  EXPENSES THAT WERE COVERED UNDER PAID MEDICAL LEAVE BY THE LIVING  DONOR'S EMPLOYER OR THAT ARE COVERED BY OTHER SOURCES  OF  REIMBURSEMENT  SUCH  AS  THE  FEDERAL  NATIONAL  LIVING  DONOR  ASSISTANCE PROGRAM. THE  PROGRAM SHALL BE THE PAYER OF LAST RESORT WITH RESPECT  TO  ANY  BENEFIT  UNDER THE PROGRAM. " 

 

I'm on NLDAC's mailing list, and  a few days ago received an email containing their policy statement on the NY State law. They say they will no longer make payments to NY residents who are covered by the NY State law.

 

 

 

Incidentally, here's my blog post from when the NY State law was passed:

Sunday, January 1, 2023 New York State's Living Donor Support Act (LDSA, S. 1594) was signed by Governor Hochul on Dec. 29

 "like the authorization for NLDAC,  the NY State law (https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/S1594) "requires that the Program shall be payer of last resort..." I hope that this doesn't turn into a competition to be the payer of last resort in a way that might cause some NY donors to fall between the cracks, and not be reimbursed either by NLDAC or the State of New York."

 

I suppose the larger lesson is that designers of competing markets can create paradoxical situations. 

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Related:

Sunday, July 16, 2023  National Living Donor Assistance Center (NLDAC): I rotate off the advisory board